The other regular encounter is one of the main characters giving a cool retort to a Sorkinesque straw man. Dialogue has never been his strong suit: every character speaks like David Mitchell writes, and I lost count of the number of times a character had a brief encounter with a stranger (usually a Spot The Famous Figure moment – Utopia Avenue is replete with obligatory but ultimately pointless 1960s celebrity Easter eggs) who would dispense some clever witticism about the nature of life. It’s possibly because Mitchell’s quirks have started to wear on my patience that I’m noticing his other flaws. Mitchell has at this point made the interconnected nature of his novels a signature move, but I’m not the first of his loyal readers to express a wish that he would leave all this behind and write something as strikingly fresh again as Ghostwritten or Cloud Atlas. It’s rather telling that the most interesting part of this story thread comes in Jasper’s early troubles and attempts to figure out what’s going on, rather than the inevitable deus ex machina arrival of Dr Marinus. One of the band members is Jasper de Zoet, a descendant of the titular Dutch clerk in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and from the age of sixteen he finds himself troubled by auditory hallucinations which, as it turns out, are not hallucinations at all but rather a very real and very dangerous attempt by a spirit to take over his body. Utopia Avenue won me over in the end, containing as it does enough other interesting stuff: deaths, romantic affairs, troubled familial relationships, a brief stretch in an Italian prison, and the obligatory cameos from the David Mitchell Extended Cinematic Universe. Clearly a passion project for Mitchell, who’s always weaved a thread of music through his writing, but not a topic I’m particularly interested in compared to, say, body-hopping immortals, 18th century trading outposts in a closed-off Japan, or even a year of childhood in provincial Britain.

But I was disinterested to begin with in the premise of Utopia Avenue: the story of a fictional British band in the heady musical world of the 1960s.

There was a time when David Mitchell could write about paint drying and I would’ve bought the book.

Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell (2020) 561 p.

Utopia avenue david mitchell review